Archive for November, 2005

Mozilla Firefox, the open source world\’s favourite browser, released version 1.5 late yesterday. New features include increased security, a speed boost, support for new Web standards, and increased support for Apple OSX. According to Firefox\’s comprehensive list of updates over the previous stable version, 1.0.7, users can expect â€œblazingly fastâ€ backward and forward navigation. The [...]

The South African Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) has built an open source fire-mapping system that enables organisations to monitor fire outbreaks across South Africa. Frederic Claudel, an image processing researcher based at the Meraka Institute, worked on the project to port the once-proprietary mapping system to open source. The Advanced Fire Information [...]

Linux experts are putting in last minute cramming this week in prepartion for this weekend\’s Linux Professional Institute exams to be held at the Innovation Hub in Pretoria. More than 35 candidates are expected to write more than 50 LPI exams during the day, adding to the pool of Linux professionals in the country. The [...]

Tectonic journalist Richard Frank\’s column about his sad 300Mhz laptop with 128MB RAM and its slow performance with Linux (Taking a fstab at Linux) caused much wrath and waving of fists among our readers. He bravely took the attack on the chin, and I hope that the experience doesn\’t slow his inevitable slide into the [...]

Broadband Internet access, which finally made an impact on South Africa in 2005 with the first 147 000 users settling into high speed online lives, will almost double in usage in 2006 to 277 000 users, according to South African research firm World Wide Worx\’ Broadband in South Africa 2005 report. The biggest success story [...]

South Africa\’s largest open source tender is unlikely to be awarded this year as government officials wind down for the holiday break. Submissions for the State Information Technology Agency (Sita) open source tender closed in October this year, with at least 12 technology companies vying to be placed on the preferred list of open source [...]

US non-profit volunteer group Geekcorps is recruiting geeky volunteers to brave darkest Africa with Linux in one hand and goodwill in the other. A division of ISEC, Geekcorps uses volunteers for four month stretches to contribute to ICT projects in developing parts of the world. Geekcorps takes care of most of the costs associated with [...]

With the latest version of Mono, version 1.1.10, a single instance of Mono can run multiple applications using Apache. Other highlights include a new deployment model, less memory usage and a near-complete C# compiler with support for the C# 2.0 specification. Mono is an open source project that allows applications designed for Microsoft\’s .Net framework [...]

The Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) has asked to help the European Union in its antitrust case against software giant Microsoft. \”The more Microsoft is able to purchase its opponents\’ solidarity, the more important FSFE\’s commitment to freedom and interoperability is,\” says Georg Greve, President of FSFE. Microsoft has settled with many of the EU\’s [...]